What does it take for an accessibility accommodation to work? That's the question I've been asking myself since I flew from Washington, D.C. to Boston in August.
As I do whenever I fly, I gave the JetBlue gate agent a one-page document with the specifications and handling information for my wheelchair. We were supposed to preboard, which gives me the additional time and space I need to transfer, get settled and make sure my chair is handled properly before everyone else gets on the plane.
Instead, I spent that time on the jetbridge while JetBlue employees tried to determine whether the removable wheels from my chair, which contain a lithium-ion battery, could travel in the cabin. General boarding continued around us. Eventually, the airline confirmed the wheels could be safely accommodated, and my fiancée, Canine Companions® Lovey and I boarded among the last passengers instead of the first.
To be fair, airlines have a responsibility to make sure equipment containing batteries can be transported safely, and I don't expect an employee to simply accept something because I handed them a piece of paper saying it's fine. But by then we were exhausted at the end of a two-week trip, and a minor fender bender earlier that morning hadn't exactly helped. The process of determining whether my wheels could fly had effectively consumed the preboarding time I actually needed.
What happened afterward made me think about this even more. JetBlue initially told me in writing that its service had not met U.S. Department of Transportation standards, then reversed that conclusion two days later because my wheels were ultimately accepted and secured onboard. I filed a complaint with DOT, and JetBlue has now formally denied a regulatory violation while acknowledging that the process interfered with my ability to use disability preboarding.
DOT may agree with JetBlue, and it may not. Still, the word I keep coming back to is "eventually." I eventually got on the plane with my wheelchair exactly as I needed it. We can look at that outcome and say that access was provided, but that doesn't tell us how much work we had to do to get there.
Maybe that's the part we sometimes miss when we talk about accessibility. The outcome matters, but so does the process we've built around accessing it. If that process requires us to repeatedly explain ourselves, find the right person, escalate the issue or wait while the thing the accommodation was supposed to make accessible passes us by, "eventually" doesn't tell the whole story.
If an accommodation eventually works, but the disabled person has to fight their way through the process to receive it, did the system actually work?